Posted
by
samzenpuson Friday June 13, 2014 @03:04AM
from the freeing-things-up dept.

the_newsbeagle (2532562) writes "The equipment that neuroscientists use to record brain signals is plenty expensive, with a single system costing upward of $60,000. But it turns out that it's not too complicated to build your own, for the cost of about $3000. Two MIT grad students figured out how to do just that, and are distributing both manufactured systems and their designs through their website, Open Ephys. Their goal is to launch an open-source hardware movement in neuroscience, so researchers can spend less time worrying about the gear they need and more time doing experiments."

Their goal is to launch an open-source hardware movement in neuroscience, so researchers can spend less time worrying about the gear they need and more time doing experiments.

My experiences with lab-built equipment in academia suggest that building your own equipment is not really a good way to "spend less time worrying about the gear". Usually you will spend quite a lot of your time worrying about DIY gear. The advantages are not in time saved, but in two other things: 1) you can build gear that would be prohibitively expensive to purchase; and 2) you can customize it in-house.

Agreed! Firstly, as the P pointed out, a significant amount of time goes into getting grants to fund the experiments. This isn't going to go away, funding is still required, but it will mean that YOUR lab now has a chance of getting the grant, as opposed to the lab that already has the machine available for use because it was funded by the last grant. This means a wider variety of labs doing the science, which is a good thing. Also, having worked for a commercial science institute that really pushed the ide

I tend to agree, but it does matter what the equipment is. I would hate to have to design, build, and maintain our own lock-in amplifier or x-ray diffractometer. I guess it depends how good the available products and companies are.

True, but imagine how bringing the cost down can lower the entry barrier for things such as teaching labs. My best course by far in undergrad was an electrophysiology course where we recorded action potentials in earthworms with just a couple electrodes and a differential amplifier hooked up to an old macintosh. Getting these technologies lower in cost may not alleviate quality concerns for high throughput research (which is what some of the quoted established company reps are saying in the article). But imagine how cheap the next iteration of these could be? An order of magnitude lower for the openBCI 8 channel EEG system http://www.openbci.com/ [openbci.com]. And with scalp potentials and a 512 hz sample rate you can measure muscle potentials too, not just brain. If you could find a way to increase the sample rate you could do things like galvanic skin response too.

Speaking as a neuroscientist (who works at MIT's Picower Institute with the OpenEphys creators) I don't think it's really true that the average end-user will spend more time with worrying about this hardware than they would a commercial system. That's true if you're starting from scratch, but this is basically a complete solution already with little-to-no development needed for users interested in doing standard extracellular ephys. Once the board is populated (a day or two at most, with a good set of dir

Just to clarify this, the current system can be put together without any assembly, everything is pretty much plug n play by now (windows, mac & linux). You can of course customize things as much as you like.
As for the data quality, measuring quality for this type of system is not at all hard. It is well known what the data is supposed to look like, and if it doesn't, its usually pretty obvious. It's a bit like a microphone and a sound card, all you need is to play a known signal and then compare the r

These are not doctors and patients, but researchers. And the device in question is a passive recorder of brain activity (AFAIK).
Also, I don't think that many people want to record the brain activity of mice, so the biggest cost here is that the equipment is pretty custom made causing big non-recurring expenses.
Furthermore, an IC subcontractor had made a miniturized four dedicated custom ICs into one, and from the article it sounds this device was the first to use the new chip. Expect all other manufactu

When a paper is published it should include the methodology used to gather the results, and if that includes a lot of untested and uncertified pieces of kit then it's going to cast serious doubts as to the validity of the findings. Have they actually found something of significance, or are they just prodding round some experimental error which wouldn't be there if they used tried and tested setups?
It'll be fine for teaching, and that will help it to gain some credibility, but for a lot of research it's g

Yea yea, FUD the shit out of open science. Only proprietary expensive instruments are valid.

With all your rage, you missed the point.

And the point is not that self-built instruments are incapable of being validated, but that you'll have to include the effort for validating them (and documenting the validation) yourself. This costs a lot of time, and, unless your time doesn't cost anything, money.

Regardless of the instrument's origin (bought for big $ from company or open source built), scientists are going to run positive controls. It's a common practice for GOOD experiments. In this case, apply treatment X to a mouse, and you should see response Y as measured by the instrument. If you don't see response Y in the positive control, you cannot trust experimental results. If the positive control give expected results, then reviewers have little choi

In fact I just checked their schematics.. no secondary isolation, and power taken from the USB or from an external PSU (not supplied or specified)

computer power supplies provide less isolation and allow higher leakage currents than a medical grade PSU, let alone one rated for BF. So it doesn't even meet basic electrical safety, let alone any other parts of IEC60601. I personally woun't want this used on me..

So how does it differ from OpenEEG project? I read the summary and I read a couple of paragraphs from their site, but it was all some round talk. You can get fully assembled 2 channel (uses smt components - it's small) OpenEEG device from Olimex for 99 euros (+electrodes and shipping costs), if you are not into soldering.

The main difference is that the open ephys system is designed for recording neurons, not just scalp potentials and scales to very high channel numbers >128 channels at rates of 30kHz, which is fast enough to do extracellular electrophysiology. That being said, a few labs are starting to use open ephys for EEG ( https://open-ephys.atlassian.n... [atlassian.net] ).

1) The ground plain is not actually at ground voltage. It never is: making it bigger will not solve all your problems, capacitive coupling to ground is *localized* and can spread signals via paths you'd never see in a circuit diagram.

Looking over the analog guys' shoulders at work, I've seen a nifty little piece of software that takes the geometry of your ground plane and its connections, and tells you where exactly you'll need to put your Cs to minimize ground plane effects.

This has always bothered me with the current state of neuroscience: The whole point of nerves/brain matter is to communicate/remember/transform information, but we're still relying on crude external cues like heat/bloodflow/electrical activity to tell us "somethings happening around...here", and that's pretty much it. It always bothers me when I hear the term "brain signals".

Nerves should be able to query their neighbors about their state, and the state of other nerves - otherwise, they wouldn't really be able to form something like a mind (as in, "the mind is what the brain does"). Why still can't we find a way to just "ask" the nerves what their state is?

Even in our simulations, we just represent nerves as nodes that grow associations - but those associations are useless, unless they can be traversed in queries by the system, to gather inputs, and send outputs at all levels.

Are we getting anywhere close to a stage where we can communicate with nerves to use that same communication system that logically must exist for it to function? Seems like even with limitations, that would be a LOT more useful than analogously inferring from traffic levels what the function of buildings in a city are, like we're doing now.

You noticed that the described project is used to implant electrodes into the brain of live animals (mostly rodents)? The aim is to measure an electrical signal that can be associated with a small cluster of neurons.

This indeed sounds cruel (and I think it is), and for such research the ethical cost has to be related to the scientific gain in a reasonable ratio.

Btw, I know researchers that say you can pull out the electrodes after the experiment and the animal could live on without much impediment. But the

1) Nerve signals aren't purely electrical, but electrochemical. You can do brute-force stimulation or detection by purely electrical means, but it's hard on the nerves (literally).

2) Nerves are tiny, and there are lots and lots of them, and they aren't arranged in a regular, predictable fashion. You can't build a standard module that plugs into any random individual human's nervous system and just works.

3) The most interesting nerves in the brain are hard to get to, because

I seem to recall that years and years ago Steve Ciarcia wrote a series of article in his Circuit Cellar magazine about making sensors and a home built EEG. If I recall correctly it used relatively inexpensive parts and off the shelf sensors when necessary. All designed for the hobbyist and much lower in cost. Of course I may be wrong. But still wondering, whats the big hoo haw about something this expensive?